Anyway, there is something really screwy with out economy if a car is actually cheaper to run per passenger than a train. R142, a subway train used in NY, has just 1.68kW worth of engine per passenger. A typical European car has a 65kW engine and seats 4, so that's 16.25kW per passenger, ie almost 10 times the energy cost.
Fuel costs are insignificant in both cases. A car doesn't require 33 full time employees to operate every 1 mile of road.
We've kinda hit peak copper, so going for mass production would drive up the prices of all electronics, including the panels themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_copper"World discoveries of new copper deposits are said to have peaked in 1996.[8] However, according to the US Geological Survey, remaining world copper reserves have more than doubled since then, from 310 million metric tons in 1996[9] to 690 million metric tons in 2013."The whole "peak X" thing is basically an accounting illusion. Those calculations are based on the assumption that the world's total reserve of whatever X is is limited to known minable sources that are financially profitable at the time of calculation. To put it another way...they assume that no new mines will ever be found, refining technology will never improve, and no financial pressure will ever exist to make it worthwhile to mine less efficient sources. So yeah, we've been in "peak oil" and "peak copper" and peak a bunch of things for decades.
Also:
Copper is a fairly common element, with an estimated concentration of 50–70 ppm (0.005–0.007%) in Earth's crust (1 kg of copper per 15–20 tons of crustal rock).[18] If all this copper were extractable, that would provide humans with a nearly inexhaustible supply of the element (millions of years worth), from that concentration adding up to around 2 quadrillion tons over the mass of the crust."Basically, it's highly unlikely we'll ever run out of copper.
It's no wonder we're having an oil crisis.
I'm pretty sure we're not. Remember we were originally supposed to reach "peak oil" in the
60s or 70s. And yet decade after decade we increase production and the doomsaying keeping getting push back. Now they're saying
2050.
Keep in mind that the US is known to have
one of the largest untapped oil reserves in the world that we're not even bothering to tap because we'd rather pay to have it shipped from across the world. Also don't forget
oil shale:
"The United States has the largest known deposits of oil shale in the world, according to the Bureau of Land Management and holds an estimated 2.175 trillion barrels (345.8 km3) of potentially recoverable oil"That works out to supplying the entire world with oil for roughly 65 years.
We're not going to run out of oil. We're going to stop using it long before we do.